The World Takes
by Aeanagwen
Summary: Aston survives, and goes back home. Isurugi survives, and lands in military prison. Somewhere along the way their paths cross. That may be important, in the end.


_Notes: This is, by nature, a bit all over the place. The Aston/Takaki stuff is mostly fluffy. The Isurugi stuff is decidedly not. Careful with this one if you're bothered by mad science of the medical variety. Otherwise, enjoy!_

* * *

Aston woke up in a healing tank a few days after shredding metal pierced his abdomen and his vision blurred to black around Takaki's groping hand and tear-streaked face. The déjà vu was immediate and intense, as Fuka pressed her hands against his temples and wept relieved tears into his hair.

 _Tekkadan's pulling out_ , Akihiro told him the next day. _We're going back home._

 _I'm staying,_ Takaki told him, later still _. I don't want to pull Fuka out of the school here_.

They each looked at him, solemn-eyed, and Aston wondered what they expected him to say.

Days later, Takaki pulled out of Aston's rough final embrace with a smile that didn't seem quite right, his gaze turned down towards the polished gleam of the spaceport's floor. All the way back to Mars, the expression lingered in Aston's mind.

Aston did something wrong. He could feel it, even still, an apprehension scratching around the implant in his spine like a stray animal. But what else could he have done? Fighting was all he knew how to do, and no one on Earth would or could hire him for that anymore; there was a legal compromise and everything. And yet, Takaki's eyes stared at him from the darkness between stars, from in his dreams—eyes he couldn't read, because he never learned a language other than violence.

 _What was I supposed to say?_

* * *

The night after the mobile armor, sleeplessness _(the blank grief in Ride's eyes, Akihiro unconscious and unmoving in Gusion's cockpit, the one small, blackened body they'd found in the ruins of the agricultural plant)_ drove Aston down to the cafeteria. Some way before he made the door, though, he lifted his head at the sound of an unfamiliar voice.

It wasn't all that unusual to hear a stranger talking around the complex—sometimes people doing business with Tekkadan visited, and Aston hadn't spent enough time with the new recruits to learn all their voices yet—but this voice was a woman, and that _was_ a bit strange. He slowed down, easing into the half-speed, cautious walk he and everyone around him had used back with the Brewers, though that had always been easier in ship's gravity than it was planet-side.

"The news here isn't saying much, and that always means it's so much worse than they're letting on, right?" the voice said as he paced softly up to the door. "Please, even if it's classified and you can't say anything, please just—let me know you're all right?"

That man who had followed McGillis Fareed around all day was in the room, sitting in the far corner. Neither he nor his boss had been in uniform—some kind of secret visit, the whispers had said—but compared to Tekkadan they had still looked composed and formal in their crisp dress shirts and jackets. Now, though, even that image scrawled into messy reality. The man's jacket was nowhere to be seen, probably back in whatever room he and Fareed were staying in, but he'd unbuttoned his shirt sleeves and tugged them back above the elbows, forearms bare as he leaned his weight against them on the table. A pale glow—a data slate, and _that's_ where the voice was coming from—shone up from the tabletop, illuminating the lines in the man's face, the crease at his forehead, the downward tug of his lips, the narrowed weariness of his eyes. Even his hair looked a bit mussed, though that was bound to happen when you wore it as long as he did and then got into mobile suit combat.

For all Aston's silence, the man still pegged him as soon as he edged around the doorframe. He looked up, tapping his data slate to pause the message or end the call or something.

"My apologies," he said, suddenly all formality. "I didn't think anyone else would be up at this hour."

Aston slipped further into the room. "It's fine."

"My name is Isurugi Camice. I came with—"

"General Fareed," Aston filled in, not meeting his eyes. "I know. Sorry for interrupting your call."

"It was only a recorded message. My sister. It can keep." A moment ticked past, empty except for the hum of the refrigerating units. Then the man spoke again, asking, "Are you recovering well?"

"It's fine." Aston shrugged. "I didn't get hurt today." Discomfort gnawed at his stomach—why was this man paying any attention at all to him? Maybe he should just make a run for the refrigerator and then retreat?

"Not from today. I meant from the fight on Earth."

Aston blinked, head swinging back around to face him. Of course Aston had recognized _him_ —he flew that blue mobile suit with the horns, you couldn't _miss_ it—but the only place the man could have heard his voice before now would have been over the QCS line in that last fight with the SAU, and that had been a sentence, maybe two.

"The General looked you up," Camice explained, still watching him with a cool, level stare that communicated nothing—or at least, nothing that matched his words, because why would Fareed have done something like that? "After the ceasefire."

"Why?" Aston asked, the word falling off of his lips with blunt abandon. "Because I nearly got him killed?"

Camice frowned—frowned _more_ —but answered. "Because he nearly killed you. Given how strongly the Acting Branch Head reacted, the General was concerned that your death might negatively impact his alliance with Tekkadan." At Aston's blank stare, he added, "The young man who went to you—Takaki Uno, wasn't it?"

Aston blinked again, and then once more as an unexplained, poorly-timed emotion tightened his throat. Even though a haze of blood and pain blocked out most of the details of those scant few minutes when he had been bleeding out in the Rodi, he could still remember the sound of Takaki's desperate voice, if not his words.

 _I miss him_ , Aston realized, a sudden answer to the dull ache of the last few weeks, heightened to a galling restlessness after everything that had happened today. _Him and Fuka._

Camice was still staring at him expectantly. Aston stuffed his hands in his pockets, turning his eyes away. _He's with Fareed_ , he rebuked himself. _They're important to Tekkadan; don't be rude._

"Yeah," he said finally, voice too rough. "It was Takaki. And I'm fine. Earth was weeks ago."

Camice hummed, a neutral sound, then said, "You should contact him. News about the mobile armor has gotten out. It's best not to let family worry more than you must."

"He isn't family." _Why would he think that, if they looked me up before? He knows I'm just Debris, not like Takaki._

"Apologies for my presumption. Orga Itsuka has used such words in the past." Camice stood, collecting his slate and a drink can. "But still—contact him."

"What's it matter to you?" He glared at the floor in favor of glaring at the man, the outsider, who knew too much and pushed too much and _definitely_ talked too much.

Camice came towards him—towards the doorway, and Aston stepped away from it, making room so he could leave. He paused on his way out, though, and Aston looked up into narrow blue-gray eyes.

"It doesn't, especially," the man admitted. "But the world takes too much from people like you. You shouldn't give up more than that." He dipped his chin, a shallow nod, and stepped away, on out into the hall. "Good night, Mr. Altland."

Aston stared at his retreating back, hands still clenched painfully tight in his pockets.

* * *

When Isurugi woke up in a Gjallarhorn healing tank, there were no tears shed over him. Instead there was a man in the Inspection Bureau uniform, and a date for a court martial hearing. The General was dead. No one told him so, not right away, but it was a simple enough thing to guess. Everything was perfunctory—his medical treatment, his indictment, his interrogation. None of it would have been so simple or so quick if McGillis had still been at large.

His grief, it seemed, would be the only thing to outlast the moment.

Gaelio Bauduin visited, eyes darkened with sorrow—other than the Investigation Bureau and the medical staff, he was the only one who visited. But Isurugi neither needed nor wanted to hear how the General died from Gaelio Bauduin, and he certainly wasn't there to serve some queer role as Bauduin's confessor. The fact that the man looked at him and saw a man who had anything in common with Ein Dalton might almost have been insulting, if Isurugi had cared to spare it a moment's thought.

After three visits gained him no response longer than a few words, Bauduin stopped coming.

Isurugi slept more than he needed to, occupied his mind with learning to identify the footsteps of those who came by the medical wing, and walled up his emotions for some undetermined future time. Eventually, they would have to let him make a call, and it wouldn't do to upset his sister.

* * *

There were prisons scattered across every inhabited planet and colony in the system, each overseen by whichever local power housed them, from the clean, modern buildings of the economic blocs to the all-but ungoverned ratholes on the poorer satellites around Jupiter. Isurugi, as a native of the Dort Colonies, had fully expected to be returned to Earth, given a cursory trial at Vingolf, then dropped in whichever African Union penitentiary had the room to spare. He never even left Rustal Elion's ship, though. The drumhead proceeding involved a split-screen display of the Investigation Bureau's Judge General and the Seven Stars' Lord Baklazan, one prosecuting officer and no defense. The whole affair took less than an hour, after which, to his dull surprise, Isurugi found himself remanded to Olympus Base on Mars.

 _He must have shaken them more than they let on if they're burying a no one like me in Mount Olympus_ , he reflected when the Judge General pronounced the sentence. Olympus Base wasn't even a prison, officially; Gjallarhorn used it to house colonial dissidents and political prisoners with life sentences, people who were never intended to walk out once they walked in. The Graze Ein hadn't been constructed at Olympus Base, but it could have been; the place attracted that sort of unscrupulous researcher.

Isurugi kept his head down, and kept to himself. The guards at the place were brutally quick at breaking up prisoner activity they didn't like the look of, and Isurugi had never been the sort to draw much attention anyway. He gave other inmates information about the outside that seemed safe and unrestricted, and didn't talk about the McGillis Fareed Incident, as the prosecutor had termed it. The outside might as well have been a different world in any case, for all that the shockwaves of the uprising reached it, and it did not take long for those who still had the spark to care about Outside to learn what information they could from him.

Weeks became months. Isurugi was well-behaved, seeing no particular reason to be otherwise. All of his wildest hopes, though barely expressed for fear of overstepping, had nonetheless been entrusted to the General and then extinguished with him. The placidity earned him a carefully-phrased message to his sister, to be allowed once a year so long as his prisoner record stayed clean, and minimum exposure to what the inmates called the Mad Science Division—the injections of drug cocktails or experimental nanomachine implants that any sort of deviance tended to attract, be it too much spirit, too little, too old, too young, too charismatic, too anti-social. A delicate balance—but Isurugi had been walking that tightwire all his life.

He thought, from time to time, of letting himself fall, of volunteering, even, for some catastrophically unethical pilot study, but without fail, the General's memory kept him from such surrenders. A confident smile and a curving lock of golden hair, gloved hands that had always twitched behind his back when people addressed him with too much familiarity, amused questions that gave way to a blank, unsmiling façade every time Isurugi had somehow disappointed or overstepped…

 _I don't think I deserve your memory, General._

McGillis (he lost track of the title, somewhere around the sixth month mark) had not particularly liked him, Isurugi knew, but he had chosen him all the same, allowed him to stay as close as he would allow anyone. Whatever it was that McGillis had seen in him, Isurugi couldn't let it be tarnished, couldn't allow Gjallarhorn to stamp it out like they had everything else. If nothing else, he could carry McGillis's memory. And so he endured.

* * *

Aston and the other Tekkadan survivors returned to Earth, where they spent a surreal few months under veritable house arrest in some safehouse of Prime Minister Makanai's clear on the other side of Canada from Edmonton, waiting for the news cycle to turn enough for the old man to decide it was safe to start mucking around with their identities. Grief receded enough to reveal paranoia, which eventually gave way to a cabin-fever restlessness. The tears still came (not for Aston, really; there had been the wrenching pain of Akihiro's death, and all the rest faded to a numb throbbing before long), but more and more, people just got _bored._

Aston spent most of his time with Derma, who spent it largely with Dante. When Dante got to be too much, he would instead lurk around Chad, who along with Eugene and Zack was handling what little Tekkadan needed to do for the name changes, which as far as Aston could tell, mainly boiled down to, "Be patient, and try to come up with a new last name you won't mind answering to."

The night after they first told him that, Aston lay awake for hours, curled up on the anger and pain—he didn't _want_ to give up Altland, dammit. And why did it matter if he kept the name anyway? Human Debris family records got excised right at the start; even freedom didn't restore them. Makanai, or whoever he had breaking the law for him, was going to have to make up completely new records for all of Tekkadan's freed Human Debris anyway, so what could anyone even prove?

He nearly got into a shouting match with Eugene about it the next day, and then spent another sleepless night trying to stop feeling guilty about the way Chad had looked through the whole thing, which he couldn't even pin down more specifically than _really hurt,_ and that was more than bad enough.

Takaki and Fuka came the next day, packed lightly and all but out of breath with how fast they'd come, which didn't even make sense, since they obviously hadn't sprinted all the way from Edmonton. But winded or not, they were _there_ , and Fuka ran straight to him the moment she saw him, in tears before she even crashed into him.

Takakai was right behind her, and suddenly Aston was wrapped up in clinging arms, ears full of Fuka's blubbering and Takaki's almost-as-wobbly, "Thank goodness. Thank goodness, Aston."

Deeply uncertain, but just as deeply relieved, Aston put one arm each around their shoulders, turned his head into Takaki's soft hair, and let himself stop thinking about a new last name for a while.

They stayed for just five days, the most school Fuka could miss at one time, allegedly on vacation, and at least at first, everything got better. Their presence fills up an empty space in Aston's life, one he'd only managed to glance at before he had to look away. With them back in it, even if all he did was sit and watch them talk—to each other, to him, to the other survivors—his whole body brimmed with a strange, warm weight.

As their time to leave got closer, though, that same horrible gnawing feeling resurfaced, the one he'd felt when he left Earth before. He couldn't stand the thought of Takaki looking at him again with that glassy, fake smile, and so in a rare fit of frustration, he brought it up to Derma.

Derma stared at him for a long time, eyebrows knotted, with the frown he'd always worn when he was trying to figure out the words for what his gut was trying to say. It was a reassuringly familiar expression, which made it all the more annoying when Derma finally came out with the completely outlandish, "Why don't you just move in with him and stay on Earth?"

Aston didn't ask, "Weren't you _listening?_ " because he knew better, but he still jerked his wrists up in an aborted hands-in-the-air gesture of frustration. "I don't have anything to doon Earth," he reminded Derma. "We can't fight here anymore."

"We're not gonna be able to fight back on Mars, either, remember?" Derma replied, chin jutting out at a stubborn angle. "Everyone's gonna have to figure out something new. You might as well do it with them."

Aston stopped at that, eyes widening. "But—Tekkadan—"

"Tekkadan's dead," Derma said, his voice harsh and low. After a moment, the sound of the words caught up to him, and he bowed his head where he sat against the wall of Aston's room, pulling his legs up to his chest and wrapping his arm around them tightly. The left-hand sleeve of his jacket hung straight and empty against his side, as good as proof. More quietly, he repeated, "It's dead. So you should stay here."

Aston straightened up off the other wall and came over, dropping himself into a rough sprawl next to Derma. He leaned back, and just a little in, close enough for their shoulders to barely touch. After a few minutes of silence, he muttered, "I'll think about it."

* * *

Chad took the parting better than Takaki had the first time. Part of being an adult, Aston supposed, or maybe it was just Chad being himself.

"I'm glad you found someplace for yourself," Chad told him, and though pain shadowed his eyes, there was nothing false in his smile or his voice. He put one hand on Aston's shoulder, and when Aston didn't push it away, squeezed briefly

Just hug him already!" That was Dante, yelling over from where he waited at the spaceport's security gate with Derma. Chad winced, and shot Dante an exasperated look.

"You don't have to," Aston said, and beside him, Takaki muffled a laugh behind his hand.

In the end, Aston and Takaki both promised Chad that they'd do their best and keep in touch when they thought it was safe to do so. As they stood at the window watching the rockets on the back of the shuttle flare to life, Takaki reached over and twined his fingers through Aston's. Aston looked over at him in surprise, but Takaki, cheeks a little pink, just went on staring ahead.

"I'm glad you stayed," he said quietly, and smiled, a soft, fragile thing on his face, shining in the early morning light.

Aston stuttered a monosyllabic agreement, and after a moment, his cheeks warming, let his fingers close around the back of Takaki's hand.

* * *

He took the first job that would have him, an overnight stocking position at a hardware store. As half a year slowly became a full one, his life once again made its way into a routine—get up around when Takaki was getting home, have dinner with him and Fuka, help Fuka with her homework (or, more often, listen while she explained it to him), go to work and spend eight hours moving crates and organizing shelves, then come home and have breakfast with Takaki in the early hours before Fuka woke. Spend a little while after they left—Fuka for school, Takaki for work—doing dishes, then curl up in his and Takaki's bed and go to sleep.

One year became two, then three. At Olympus Base, Isurugi fell in with a small group of unionists from the SAU, laborers and professors who had just enough people on the outside to bribe guards for them, and so kept a small library in circulation. He wasn't a fluent speaker of the old pre-Europan language the Gjallarhorn elite favored, but he could read snippets of it, work his way around its long compounds and throaty fricatives. It opened the pages of one of the history books that had previously been nothing but interesting pictures to the group; this earned him both access to the books, a good way to keep his mind occupied, and something of a social circle, important so as not to be marked as a loner.

Five years after Tekkadan's last stand, Fuka graduated from primary to secondary school, glowing with almost as much pride as her brother, who whistled and cheered for her at the back of the auditorium despite the stares it drew him. Aston, applauding along with the crowd, allowed himself the one day to not be suspicious of everyone who so much as looked at them sidelong.

One of the SAU professors offended a warden, somehow; the man vanished into a special project group and never came back out. The books were confiscated in a midnight sweep and Isurugi, who'd been in possession of one at the time, found his one annual message revoked and his name added to a list of subjects for a study beginning at the start of the new year.

* * *

After seven years on the job, Aston's supervisor finally bullied him into either taking a promotion or moving into a specialization.

"I don't ever want to be in charge of people," he told Takaki the next morning, as the two of them lay curled in bed together. "What do you think I should pick?"

"Well…" Takaki dropped his chin on Aston's shoulder. "What do you think is interesting? Do you like yards? Wiring? Painting?"

" _Not_ painting," Aston said with a short huff. "People take forever to make up their minds about the smallest thing."

"It _is_ their homes, after all," Takaki said, his lips turned up into a smile against Aston's skin. "But okay, not painting. What else is there?"

Eventually, Aston decided that if he had to talk to customers, he'd rather be an authority than an expert, and moved into Tools, where he took a muted but distinct pleasure in being allowed to hold outdoor axes as long as his forearm and talk about the different engine outputs of power tools. Getting off of nights at long last took some serious sleep adjustment, but on the other hand, it did mean more time with his family, and Aston would never complain about that.

* * *

Isurugi spent most of the next four months fighting off a complete identity breakdown thanks to a neurochip implant designed, as best he could guess, to interphase with a paired subject held—somewhere else. He could never pin it down, though Vingolf would be the logical choice. He dealt with the tremors of phantom pain, he dutifully reported the incidents of double vision or sudden sounds that had no source in his own surroundings. He didn't fight the other sentience that took hold of his tongue and tried, in a slurred and garbled way, to report on the stimuli that they were experiencing on their end. He didn't try to reach back through the link himself, clinging instead to his own sense of self, but the researchers didn't seem to mind. From the hushed conversations, it seemed they looked at him as a good blank slate.

He endured, and he wept only once, for the first time in years, when he tried to think of his sister's name and came back with a stranger's instead.

And then it all stopped. With a suddenness that had to mean a plug being pulled somewhere up the bureaucratic chain of command, the implant was removed in a swift, unceremonious surgery. He was returned to his cell (to the shock of everyone in the block), had the confiscated book returned, and given the opportunity to resume communications with his sister in exchange for signing a strictly-worded non-disclosure agreement. The last was the most baffling of all of it—no one left Mount Olympus, and his messages to his sister had always been scoured of classified information before being sent. Who the hell did they expect him to disclose anything _to?_

The answer came at the end of a month filled with treatment so worryingly good that he was beginning to fear assault from the other inmates. Isurugi was escorted to a room he hadn't seen before, one appointed like a study. Real studies didn't bolt their furniture to the floor, of course, and they certainly didn't have a steel ring to secure ankle restraints molded into the floor next to the chair sitting in front of the desk.

Isurugi hadn't been fixed with ankle restraints. There was no one sitting at the desk. The guards just steered him inside and closed the door behind him. After a moment, he sat down in the chair and began waiting for something to make sense.

When the door opened next, ten minutes later—perhaps more, perhaps less; Isurugi was still recovering his sense of the passage of time—Todo Mirkonen walked in first. He locked eyes with Isurugi and grinned, as lopsided and distastefully cunning as he had the very first time McGillis had introduced them. He even still had the same regrettable taste in moustache styling.

He did not make anything make sense. Not until he flipped Isurugi a mocking salute and turned back to hold the door for Almiria Bauduin. The girl—no, certainly not a girl anymore, but rather a young woman who wore her finery like a holstered pistol, and with a poise that suggested the license to use it. Like a stalled engine, Isurugi's brain rumbled back to life.

McGillis's widow walked in and looked Isurugi up and down with cool, calm eyes, then paced across the room to him to present her hand. Without hesitation, he took her fingers in his own, bending his head over the small ring gleaming against the pristine white of her glove.

"It's good to see you again, Lieutenant," she greeted him. Isurugi didn't bother to correct her about his rank, just closed his eyes, a long-unpracticed smile trying to twitch his lips into the proper arrangement. When he didn't speak, her other hand dropped over his hair, a delicate, protective touch. Her voice above him held not the slightest trace of uncertainty.

"When I leave today, I will be taking you with me."

Isurugi nodded, and in the back of his memory, McGillis smiled.

 _This time, I won't fail you._

* * *

"Oh! That's so nice!"

At Fuka's startled declaration, Takaki looked up from his stack of office paperwork and Aston from the book he'd been reading, the latest in a series of titles surreptitiously added onto Takaki's library list. Fuka, who had been watching a celebrity news show while she adjusted the hem on what was going to be her prom dress, looked over her shoulder at them and beamed.

"She's been in seclusion for years now," she explained as, on the mounted display screen of their small CCS terminal, the camera footage zoomed in on the entrance to some kind of boutique store and the girl coming out of it, her lavender hair tucked under a broad-rimmed hat. The girl was flanked by two men, one holding the door, the other helping her down the shop's front step. "She was married to—um."

Fuka broke off suddenly, her face falling. Aston glanced at her, then looked back at the headline, which read, "Almiria Bauduin, back in public?"

Bauduin. It sounded a little familiar, but…

Then Takaki's breath caught, the comfortable lines of his body tightening into sudden tension, and before Aston could ask him what was wrong, Takaki was scrambling forward, nearly cracking his chin on the table and narrowly missing Fuka's needle cushion in his fumbling to pause the feed.

"That's—!"

Fuka shot Takaki an uncertain look, her eyes gone round beneath knotted eyebrows. Aston leaned forward and put his hand on his partner's back.

"Takaki…?"

Takaki pulled the display screen off its mount and leaned back into Aston's touch. His face had gone slack, his eyes wide. Fuka, after a moment of looking up at him, moved his paperwork to the floor and boosted herself up to the couch in its place.

"I'm sorry I mentioned it," she mumbled. "I wasn't thinking; it—"

Takaki shook his head. "Not her, _him_ ," he said, voice still uneven with shock. He pointed at the older of the two men, the one holding the door. Aston and Fuka both leaned in closer around Takaki as he went on. "That's Todo Mirconen. He worked at CGS, back when—when we _were_ still CGS. What's he doing on Earth? And with someone like Almiria Bauduin?"

Aston narrowed his eyes at the man on the screen. He had a little dark patch of a mustache beneath a wide nose, obvious sideburns and a high forehead, and in the picture, looked to be carrying the girl's bags on one arm. He looked distantly familiar, but the girl didn't at all, and Tekkadan hadn't been CGS since before he left the Brewers. Where would he even know someone like that from?

He glanced up to the other face in the picture, the younger man, his image visible only in profile—medium-length hair that curled slightly at the ends, and a serious face with narrow eyes and a long, straight nose. Familiarity twinged in Aston's gut like a hook.

"Who was she married to, Fuka?" he asked. He broke his stare at the screen only long enough to set the feed to a frame-by-frame advance before he went back to searching his memory for faces that matched the images on the screen.

"She, um…" In his peripheral vision, Fuka's hands twisted together nervously. Takaki reached over and patted them.

"It's okay," he murmured. "It was a long time ago."

"Mm," Fuka responded, uncertain, then took a shallow breath. "She's McGillis Fareed's wife. Or—widow, I guess."

Aston's eyes widened as the memory— _memories_ —clicked into place. Camice looked older than when Aston had seen him last, hovering behind McGillis on the Isaribi's bridge. It wasn't just the years, though; he was haggard in the broad daylight of the newsfeed footage, his eyes deep-set and shadowed in his face. And he _definitely_ wasn't in a Gjallarhorn uniform anymore; the dress shirt looked more like what he'd been wearing in the cafeteria that night after the mobile armor.

"He was driving Fareed around after he made General," Aston said, pausing the feed again and pointing at Takaki's Mirconen. "I remember Eugene complaining about him." He moved his finger across the screen again to point at the girl's other companion. "And _he_ was McGillis's subordinate—something Camice. I don't remember his full name; it sounded kind of Oceanian. I thought he died during the Earth retreat."

The three of them finally turned their heads up from the screen to exchange glances with at one another.

"So…" Fuka begins. "A dead man's widow, who's been in a sanitarium or something since he died. A dead man's chauffeur—"

"—who should be back on Mars laying low, not running around in public where someone might recognize him." Takaki put in. "And…"

"And a man who's supposed to be dead himself," Aston finished, frowning back down at Camice's image. "He fought in the uprising and everything. I heard people say they watched that asshole in the enemy Gundam drill him in half. _We_ sure didn't save him, and if we didn't, it had to be Arianrhod."

 _I wonder if his family's worried_ , came the quiet thought, along with the memory of the man's tired face in the light of the data slate, listening to a recorded message from who knew how far away.

"And Arianrhod wouldn't have pardoned someone that close to the leader of the whole uprising," Takaki concluded. His eyes had gone narrow, his brow furrowed. "So what are they all doing together?"

"Maybe they just miss him...?" Fuka ventured, but her hands still picked nervously at her skirt.

"I don't think Todo's the sentimental type," Takaki said, shaking his head. He looked over at Aston again. "Should we—?"

"Mm." Aston nodded, and with a few quick presses around the screen, saved the image and a link to the footage. "We should tell the others."

"I've got Eugene's messaging ID written down in my closet," Fuka said, and stood up, reaching down to gather up her dress and sewing supplies before hurrying off to her room.

Takaki tucked himself closer against Aston and tapped the screen. The two of them watched as Camice opened the back door of a car parked at the curb and helped Almiria Bauduin in, Mirconen going around the back to put the bags in the trunk. The footage cut away just after, back to the main program and the unreadable, camera-ready smile of the newscaster. Aston shut the display off and leaned forward to put it back in the terminal.

"We'll deal with it," he said aloud. Takaki's arms found their way around Aston's waist, tightening as Takaki hummed softly in response. More firmly, Aston added, " _They'll_ deal with it," and pushed down on the rising unease in favor of squeezing Takaki back.

"Everything's gonna be fine."


End file.
